2026-06-16 Tue
Lessons Learned from Mollick's Choosing to Stay Human
- I recently read Ethan Mollick's Choosing to Stay Human (One Useful Thing) and I was reminded about a distinction between
- Cognitive offloading - using tools to extend what you can do (notes, calculators, search). Historically benign, often beneficial.
- Cognitive surrender - when the tool does your thinking and you stop trying. Mollick mentions a BCG consultant study where professional consultants abandoned critical thinking when AI gave confident-sounding wrong answers. This implies that the "default" interaction with AI seems to be one of cognitive surrender rather than cognitive offloading
- He talks about two separate papers from the same Wharton team (Bastani et al.) reach apparently opposite conclusions w.r.t AI's ability to help learning:
- AI is detrimental to learning - Turkish high school math - ChatGPT for homework → better homework scores, worse unassisted test performance. Shortcutting the struggle shortcutted the learning.
- AI can help learning if it produces optimal friction - Taipei Python course - have AI sequence practice problems matched to student knowledge state) → +0.15 standard deviation on final exams, ≈ 6–9 months of schooling. Same researchers, different outcome.
- Mollick mentions that people regularly report that they learn more from entertaining lectures, even if they actually learn more from doing hard problems and quotes a paper Measuring actual learning vs feeling of learning in response to being actively engaged in the classroom.
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